Judith Potts was an actress and is now a voice, acting and presentation coach. She is married with two children, three stepchildren and is the proud grandmother to two grandsons. She lives in west London and Yorkshire. In 2008 she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She can be contacted at judith.potts@telegraph.co.uk and is on Twitter @JudithPotts.

Do hospice nurses show more empathy than general NHS nurses?

Following my last blog post, my attention has been drawn to the National Gold Standards Framework. If I understand it correctly, this is already part of the NHS, but – at the moment – concentrates solely on "quality end-of-life training".

The website – www.goldstandardsframework.nhs.uk – explains that the programmes offered "enable generalist front-line staff to provide quality carefor people nearing the end of life". The "front-line staff" include GPs, district nurses, staff in care homes and, included recently, hospital staff working in acute wards. The courses cover dementia care, clinical skills for care home staff, spiritual care and – this year – specialist care for children.

These training courses, added to the work done by Help the Hospices, mean that, for NHS nurses, there is plentiful access to extra skills which may not be covered by nurses' "education". I am reliably informed that the word "training" should no longer be applied to nurses – nowadays they are "educated" not "trained". More is the pity, it seems to me and to many of the people who commented on the blog post or emailed me. The "trained" nurses of old believed they had a "duty of care" to their patients – all too often missing in some of the modern nurses.

However, it does seem extraordinary that – as so many readers pointed out, nurses now have to hold a university degree – the qualification does not already meet the Gold Standard?

The holistic approach promoted by the Gold Standards Framework is plain commonsense. Filling in forms and handing out drugs are but a small part of a nurse’s job. Carers in residential homes, who are paid the minimum wage and have the same amount of paperwork to undertake as do nurses, very often offer this holistic approach to their residents without the benefit of a university “education”. They would appear to have a greater understanding of and empathy for their residents or patients. Are these the nurses of old – people who have the right attitude but, for all sorts of reasons, cannot undertake a degree course?

I asked why there is such a marked difference between the hospice nurses and the general NHS nurses. A reader emailed me with his explanation:-

The difference is that hospices are charities. If they want the public to donate money or time to them, they have to do a good job or they won't continue to get money, and because they have a large degree of operational freedom, they can also do things without ticking government boxes.

The NHS, of course, gets your money regardless. What are you going to do if they don't deliver the service you want? That's why we need a market in healthcare, so that people can choose their hospitals. The ones run with all the inefficiency and rudeness of most NHS hospitals will soon find themselves being run out of business, while the good ones survive.

A few years from now, people will wonder why we put up with such shoddy hospitals for so long…

I wonder – will his prediction prove correct? The Gold Standards Framework insists that patients should be treated as VIPs. That needs to include all patients.